The department of Precision Photochemical Materials uses light to make soft matter materials with high precision, exploiting the wavelength-dependent chemistry of photochemical reaction processes. Over the last decade our laboratory has employed monochromatic tuneable laser systems to reveal a mismatch between the absorptivity of a chromophore and its photochemical reactivity for many covalent bond forming, as well as bond cleavage, reactions. Our data challenges the long-held paradigm that effective photochemical reactions are always obtained in situations where there is strong overlap between the absorption spectrum and the emission wavelength under a given set of reaction conditions. However, the absorption spectrum of a molecule provides only information about singlet excitation and remains largely silent on the accessibility of the critical triplet states as well as the changes in energy states influenced by the local environment around a molecule, which dictate photochemical reactivity. In our department, we explore the fundamentals of wavelength resolved photochemistry and exploit these for tailoring photochemical applications in light-driven soft matter materials design - most-notably in photopolymerizations, advanced light-driven multi-material 3D printing, colloidal systems, and surface modification - with high precision, exploiting wavelength orthogonal, synergistic, cooperative, and antagonistic photochemical reaction modes. Our photochemical advances find application in additive manufacturing, biomedical materials, and optoelectronics.

The department of Precision Photochemical Materials work across two continents, being at home at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and within the Soft Matter Materials Laboratory, Macroarc, at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

AI-Integrated MOF Synthesis Group

Nanomedicine Group

Surface Catalysis Group

Self-Reporting Fluorescent Materials